[AusNOG] Off Topic - Brisbane recruitment recommendations

[Jason Mikronis]

Being a generalist means you simply read the documentation, and it makes sense!

Even the specialists still refer to documentation as their features change every software update!

Jason

From: AusNOG [mailto:ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net] On Behalf Of Bevan Slattery
Sent: Friday, 13 May 2016 8:33 PM
To: Mark Newton <newton at atdot.dotat.org>
Cc: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net; chad at cpkws.com.au
Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Off Topic - Brisbane recruitment recommendations

+2

+1 for the statements supporting generalists over specialists and

+1 for "Cloudy Cloud McCloudington".  #genius

[b]

On 13 May 2016, at 10:13 PM, Mark Newton <newton at atdot.dotat.org<mailto:newton at atdot.dotat.org>> wrote:
On 13 May 2016, at 7:02 PM, Chad Kelly <chad at cpkws.com.au<mailto:chad at cpkws.com.au>> wrote:

On 5/12/2016 10:07 AM, ausnog-request at lists.ausnog.net<mailto:ausnog-request at lists.ausnog.net> wrote:

Most people are having trouble at the moment.



It is an interesting time that I've spoken about at Commsday events,

talking about the void of skills in certain areas:



- Cloud specialisation and experience (AWS, Azure, Google Compute)

- DevOps skills - Ansible, Puppet, Chef - with deployment experience

- Network (Cisco/Juniper/etc) + Linux + NetDevOps experience

- Anyone with actual experience on SDN

- IoT infrastructure experience - even using the AWS/Azure tools

- Languages like Golang
But these are all different skills.

How many skills do you have? More than one?


Your not going to find an individual with skills in every single platform and every single operating system as they are all slightly different.

This is a consequence of mismanagement in the IT industry. It's a growing problem.

It is my belief that quite a lot of the specialisation that exists now is a dead end. We actually need generalists in a Cloudy Cloud McCloudington world. People who understand concepts across a broad swathe of many IT disciplines, and how they interrelate to each other; and with enough applied skill to attack any problem from that "first principles" understanding.

Even the newer Cloud platforms such as AWS and Google Compute vary slightly with what they can do and how they opperate.

They all use the same concepts. A generalist can write you an API server front-end which can drive the provisioning pipelines on both of them via the same client-facing API, and write monitoring plugins to import performance metrics from both of them into the same Prometheus instance.

A specialist will say, "I'm really good at AWS," but doom you to maintaining two incompatible OAM systems if you ever decide to put some of your workloads in GCP.


You are better off building teams and having people with specific skill sets working on particular projects.

People who believed that statement in the 1990s spent tens of thousands of dollars on Novell or Windows for Workgroups vendor certifications, then went into full revolt when Windows NT came along and their "specific skill sets" we're suddenly obsolete.

If you want to get ahead long-term in IT, be a generalist.

   - mark


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